STALKER Complete 2009 1.4 Release news

This mod takes full advantage of Shader Model 3.0 and introduces advanced shader technology first seen in the game “Crysis”. This tool allows creating close-to-life illusions of true relief and depth, in addition to adding rendering techniques creating an enormous difference in the way the game looks. Improvements include:

• Parallax Occlusion Mapping - Gives 2D textures the illusion of 3D geometry, most visible on surfaces such as brick walls.
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - A shading method that approximates the way light radiates in real life, creating soft shadows in corner-type places with a difficult lighting sample.
• Depth of Field - An effect that creates a gradual decrease in sharpness determined by the subject distance. For example, a distant landscape will appear blurry when compared to closer objects.
• Motion Blur - A streaking effect frequently used to show a sense of speed when the camera quickly moves around.
• Particle system - Enhanced rendering of fire, explosions, smoke, muzzle, sparks, falling leaves, anomalies, fog, and more.
• Water Shaders - Improved water effects ported from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky.
• Fire Dynamic Lighting - Fire now illuminates the surroundings, casting dynamic shadows.

This mod includes a texture overhaul featuring the “Photorealistic Zone”, a total rework of every texture in game by Argus over a nine month period. Special attention has been given to preserve the game’s original look while the original textures have been replaced with higher quality versions and manually bump-edited files. The textures are heavily optimized to reduce performance impact. Elements that are improved include:

• Locations - all textures replaced with higher quality photographs with partial use of original files, creating highly detailed outdoor and indoor environments.
• Living Creatures - Mutated creatures have soaking wet flesh showing through wounds, creating a disturbingly graphic effect. Also, all humans in Zone have been retouched down to even the finest details (armor, shoes, wrinkles, faces, even their eyeballs).
• Vehicles - 20 year old vehicles in the Zone now appear realistically rusted and abandoned.

The game’s notorious reputation of being a huge bugfest ends here. Over the past two years a joint community effort has accumulated fixes for most known bugs and crash to desktop exits left out by developers after patch 1.0005. With the release of the unofficial community patch, bug fixes and numerous positive gameplay tweaks are implemented, such as realistic weapons names, reduced head bobbing, increased actor’s height, increased inventory weight limit, extended quest times, and more.

Artificial Intelligence received major reworking:

• New abilities - NPCs can avoid anomalies, remove dead bodies from camp sites, throw grenades, change armor, and even heal other NPCs. You can also give weapons and armor to NPCs by selling or dropping it near them and giving them privacy to equip them (NPC’s preferences may prevent them from accepting the items, however).
• Early detection - Removed the ability for NPC's to notice you at unrealistically large distances.
• Stealth - Knife and other critical sounds such as falling dead bodies, grass, and footsteps have been properly commented to reduce their sound radius, making the gameplay much more realistic.
• Death panic - Reduced the sound distance of death cries (in the original game it caused the entire camp to alert once one member was hit, as it was set to be heard at a great distance).

(authors: DolgovStudio.com, MulleR, Mongol)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is not exactly a textbook example when it comes to localization. Misspelled words, typos, grammatical errors, and humor lost in translation can be charming at times given the context, but creating unnecessary difficulty in understanding their meaning. Most of the text received a grammar-friendly rewrite, providing a much improved English localization.

(authors: Tharawdeal, Onionradish, Dethtoll)

A visual overhaul mod isn’t complete without a new, custom user interface. This is why we are proud to present our very own Main Menu, Loading Screen, and redesigned HUD. Created by our graphic design firm, the interface incorporates existing in-game art and photographs of actual Chernobyl disaster zone artifacts, adding a unique art style and authentic feel. Certain buttons have been conveniently reorganized for more intuitive access and new shortcuts added, such as ESC+S which works like a “smart quick-save”, creating a separate save file with the level name, in-game date, and timestamp each time it’s used.

• Sleeping Bag - It’s always in the inventory and allows the player sleep in-game.
• Faction Change and Reset - Now players have the ability to reset hostile status and join factions outside of the storyline.
• Ragdoll Physics - Natural death and hit animation, and kills will no longer cause extreme ragdoll effects.
• Bulb tweak - Now you can shoot the lights out!
• Gnomus' Scopes - High resolution scopes for widescreen and standard monitors.
• Repair Kit - A special item to the game that allows you to repair weapons and armors out in the Zone. The only way to get this rare item is to loot it from a NPC’s corpse.
• Repair Services - The bar trader and Screw now sell weapons and armor repair services.
• Chernobyl TV - Replaced the original TV animation with actual Chernobyl footage.
• Elite Nightvision - Black & white night vision based on the psy_antenna postprocess effect. This one really makes you see in the dark.
• ZRP Teleport - The ESC+J shortcut lets you jump between the points in the environment.
• Third-Person View - Press F1, F2 and F3 to cycle through camera views and + or - to zoom in & out. (by default this feature enables camera toggle only, add -psp switch to a shortcut to activate a third-person gameplay, please refer to Technical FAQ page 15 for assistance).
• Other features - Authentic food and drink skins, the ability to drag dead creatures’ bodies, the ability to carry selected explosive fuel cans & barrels, the ability to shoot birds, and more!

After your journey ends with the “good” ending, you’ll get the dialogue that will let you continue the game in freeplay mode, allowing creatures and NPCs to migrate freely about in the environment. It will be a living and breathing zone with self sustained A-Life and unscripted events. This feature doesn’t remove the ending scene, so players will still have the enjoyment of viewing the cinematic completion of the game. You can skip the entire story line from the start by pressing ESC+T while in-game and teleporting to the last map or by clicking Freeplay and “Equip for Level” to start from the first map.